Both Pacino and DeNiro disappointed me when they started playing caricatures of themselves. DeNiro with the line-repeating/Italian meatball gangster schtick and Pacino with the "Hoo-ah!"s and the unleashed volcano schtick.

But, they're still both great actors when they want to be. Pacino in "Donny Brasco", DeNiro in "Copland".

Couldn't agree more. I saw the first two Godfather movies for the first time in ten years recently, and was pleasantly surprised how shocking it was when Pacino lost his rag. I'd put Pacino in the same box as De Niro and Jack Nicholson - they're good actors but need great material and very firm direction to keep the ham off the menu. Don't know if Dali - or Andrew Niccol, whose 'Lord of War' drew a perfomance from Nicolas Cage that was hypnotically awful in its campy hysterics - is going to be the trick though.

I'd put Pacino in the same box as De Niro and Jack Nicholson - they're good actors but need great material and very firm direction to keep the ham off the menu.

I dunno. To me a great actor is someone who doesn't need either of those things to pull off a good performance. Look at "Backdraft"--mediocre movie with a mediocre script and a mediocre director, and yet both DeNiro and Donald Sutherland were able to pull good performances out of it. I think it has more to do with the role itself and how excited the actor is about it. I assume Pacino would be excited about playing Dali and would do the best he could with it.

Don't know if Dali - or Andrew Niccol, whose 'Lord of War' drew a perfomance from Nicolas Cage that was hypnotically awful in its campy hysterics - is going to be the trick though.

Cage is weird. He's a good actor but he seems to really get off on being seen as macho. "ConAir"? WTF was that?

Nah, I think if Pacino isn't doing it for the money (as I assume he did for movies like "Dick Tracy" and "Devil's Advocate"--movies I like to bring up when people talk about his unequivocal greatness), he'll be good regardless of the director.

maybe if Johnny Depp had his face squashed to make it narrower, there might be a way to make him look vaguely like Salvador Dali, but the only way he could be made to resemble anything to do with Salvador Dali is to have him wear a white silk sock over his head and have a perfectly balanced kidney bean on the top of his cranium. I always enjoy missing Johnny Depp movies and if I could miss even one more Johnny Depp movie I probably would feel immensely fortunate. I can't comment about his acting.

I see how Al Pacino can be made to resemble a middle aged Salvador Dali quite well, but whether he finally will is another matter.